


Lie Undone

by Crescence



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, i think??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-05
Updated: 2016-07-05
Packaged: 2018-07-21 17:18:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7396486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crescence/pseuds/Crescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky stares into Steve's eyes as the cryo chamber comes to life and thinks about all the times he couldn't make it right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lie Undone

The decision is his. So it’s him walking up to the chamber, body weight still unbalanced without the metal on his left, feeling a bit like soap bubble floating down the drain when the plug is pulled. Steve is only a few steps behind him, footfalls as familiar as nothing is anymore. Maybe what’s missing is the cobblestone paths and cheap wooden floors that creak on every third step to make it right, you can find neither in Wakanda, and yet there he is behind him, within each other’s orbit like they had been for the better part of his life. The presence of him is far more assuring than the two feet thick walls around them said to be capable of withstanding a nuclear fallout. It is him he trusts, not the walls, despite the untainted white he moves through, so unlike the grime and dirt he was rubbed bloody against. He only trusts him, despite the help he received, medicine he was given to alleviate his pain upon losing the arm, despite the respectful distance and careful attention he was shown. 

The chamber’s glass door whispers open. A sigh behind him resonates the sound. Bucky feels the hair on his arms stand. He wonders the shade of his blue eyes as, behind him, Steve watches him go under. Is it clear and expansive, infinite like the sky over Manhattan when neither of them had known war; full of hope and potential? Or is it bottomless and murky like the waters of the Potomac when he almost lost him? He steels himself without his steel, bones shifting and moving by choice to prepare him inhaling the cold; a conscious effort to allow this to happen to him instead having it be done to him and yet it takes every last shred of control he has managed to put together in the last week to not run away. 

Head scientist of the team responsible for him moves along, helping him step into the chamber and then turning away without a single extra commentary. They all give him space, not out of fear but something, he incredulously recognized on his second night here, a sullen respect. 

There are no binding straps in the chamber, only a loose gray band over his chest and the padded table at seventy degree angle with the glass around him. He is told he doesn’t need to fasten the band. He puts his head back and his eyes find Steve, four feet away from him, arms folded, jaw set. Bucky isn’t the only one steeling himself without his steel. 

He sees them in their white lab coats behind their monitors, pointing at data on their screens and talking to each other with low voices, barely audible over the purr of the cryo chamber he cocooned himself in. A soft female voice comes from within the chamber. She informs him that the final checks are being done and asks if he is still ready to go. 

“I am,” he answer. Steve’s adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. _He_ isn’t. 

Bucky closes his eyes. From his toes to his fingers he focuses on every bone in his body to relax, to release the tension building up in him by second. _My decision_ , he repeats himself. _I’m in control. I want to do this._ He opens his eyes. Steve’s gaze finds him like the light at the end of the tunnel. 

Potomac it is then. 

Bucky gives him a curt nod. _For him_ , he reminds himself. 

“Sergeant Barnes, we are ready. Please confirm the initiation.”

Steve takes half a step forward, lips parting, almost reaching out. Bucky’s heart stumbles in his chest. Thuds of two irregular beats he feels in a collapsed breath. A monitor on his left beeps. Scientists murmur. 

He won’t feel a thing. Neither the cold, nor the passing of time. He will be asleep, put under until some solution is found for the blinding darkness in his mind. Until no words can make him wrap fingers around the neck of the one person he already died once to keep alive. 

But Steve… with his excruciating self-awareness and loneliness a century out of his time, will count every day Bucky is here. How old will he be the next time he is awake? How many minutes of how many days will he spend staring at glass frozen on the inside, much like the man encapsulated behind it? 

Steve’s lips thin into a line as he holds back whatever it was he was going to say. He withdraws, intention and feeling folding back like waves rolling away in low tide. His hands clasp into fists. He swallows again and gives Bucky a smile instead. Small and forced if Bucky has ever seen one, but he does it anyway because Steve never asks for a thing. Regardless of his body size, Steve makes himself small and tucks away. Steve just gives. 

Bile lodges in Bucky’s throat. Steve allows him his choice and in return he should accept his ruse. Isn’t that how it has always been between them? Haven’t they always pretended not to notice the other’s feint? The stolen glance at mirrors, hands clenching on impulses restrained, things only their pillows heard in the mucky dead hours of the night. 

Bucky returns the smile.

“I’m ready.”

“Cryogenic sleep initiation confirmed. We now begin the procedure.”

And then the chamber around him comes to life, letting out a breeze of air as the glass door raises. Bucky keeps his gaze on Steve, focusing solely on him as claustrophobia threatens to take over his senses. He can already feel the temperature dropping. 

Steve looks down at his feet, arms folded over his chest and brows furrowing and there is a tremble in his lips and when he meets his gaze once again, what Bucky sees is not the Potomac. It’s the payne gray of the Alpine mountains. That empty desperation, the very same helplessness he fell away from into a ravine when another piece of metal gave in on him. 

“Wait. Stop.” Bucky raises a hand against the glass. The voice responds almost at once.

“Terminating cryogenic sleep initiation. Sergeant Barnes, are you alright?”

Steve’s arms unfold, he moves another step, eyes darting between Bucky and the head scientist who moves out of her desk and closer to the chamber. The glass lowers with a hiss. 

“I’m alright. I just need a minute.”

“Bucky…”

He barely waits for the door the recede into its place before stepping out, heading straight for Steve.

“Buck, what’s wro-“ is all he can manage before Bucky’s fingers curl around the back of his neck and he is pulled in. Bucky swallows the rest of his words and the gasp that follows it. An infinitesimal part of his mind registers the silence that falls over the laboratory. Every other part of him, from the tips of his fingers buried in golden hair to his lips pressed hard against Steve’s are hyper-aware of nothing but him. He feels it in his own bones when Steve’s initial shock is replaced with a realization so profound he starts shaking in his arm, his lips part beneath his own and a sob rips through him. It sounds so broken, so lost and weak with neglect, Bucky tightens his grip on him, pressing his weight against the body unraveling before him. 

Both of Steve’s hands find his face, cupping his face and Steve is crying into the kiss and Bucky kisses him like he has kissed no dame in a century and he holds him still, holds him together, holds him like he has always wanted to hold him since he was fourteen and Steve was a wiry brat wearing his heart on his sleeve. When their lips part, their foreheads remain connected and Bucky breathes in the silent rasps that falls from Steve’s lips as he tries to collect himself, chest shuddering against his own with sighs that rock his whole body. He presses light kisses to his lips Steve responds to wetly, coaxing and uncoiling the admission out of him, undoing the ruse that climbed to the greatest lie they told each other over the years, move by move, kiss by kiss. Steve breaks asunder. 

“Bucky…” he whispers, voice hoarse and more unstable than Bucky’s ever heard him. 

Bucky pulls his head back to align their gazes. “Stevie, listen.”

Blue, not the Potomac, nor the Alpines, a shade he hasn’t seen before, unleashed and entire without guard, finds his eyes and knocks the breath out of Bucky harder than the kiss had done. 

“I’m not leaving you,” he whispers into the space between them. Steve’s eyes drink him in, hands still cupping his face, body still pressed against him. 

“So don’t look at me like you did back then. Stevie.. I.." his voice almost breaks. "The last thing I was thinking was that look you gave me. That I couldn’t.. I couldn’t make it right.”

A whimper falls from Steve’s lips before he buries his face in the crook of Bucky’s neck, arms wrapping around his shoulders. Bucky uses the only hand he has to hold him and whispers into his ear.

“I need this. I need this for us. But I swear to you, I am not leaving you.” 

Bucky pulls away to find his gaze again.

“God be my witness, I ain’t leaving you ever again.”

He kisses him once more with no modesty, no pleasantries. Starved and absolved for the first time in over seventy years, he takes as much as he gives and when they still against each other once again with lungs pushed to their limits even as enhanced as they are, Steve is almost himself. There is even the ghost of a smile on his reddened lips. 

“Okay. If you promise.”

“I do.”

“Okay.”

Only then they part but Steve won’t let go of his hand and Bucky couldn’t care less after kissing in front of a room full of Wakanda’s best. He realizes they had moved farther away to give them as much privacy as they could. One by one, they return as he goes back into the chamber, and Steve is right there with him and even if he doesn’t look completely at ease, he does seem calmer, the storm behind his eyes quiet, his jaw lax and hands unclenched. 

“Since when?” he asks him when Bucky rests his head against the padded table once again. 

“Fourteen,” Bucky replies and Steve’s eyes mist only a little bit before he reaches to brush his hair away from his forehead and smiles.

“Taking your sweet time, Barnes. Don’t keep me waiting too long.”

Bucky feels an old smile claim his lips, one that puts a light in Steve’s eyes and realizes he hasn’t felt an ounce of panic since he stepped out of the chamber to kiss Steve. 

“Better be here when I wake, Rogers. Don’t know who I might kiss in the confusion.”

And there, that lovely shade of red creeps up Steve’s cheeks and the nostalgia is so strong he nearly expects to feel the humid wind of Brooklyn summers on his skin. 

Steve carefully leans forward and kisses him gently on the lips but the smile that follows is nothing short of wicked.

“No one else will do now, jerk. It has got to be me.”

\---

When the glass door rises and the cryo steam fills his lungs, Bucky’s hand is still against the glass, aligned beneath Steve’s on the other side and the last thought in his mind is that he has left Steve alone to deal with a room full of scientists that has just seen Captain America make out with a man. 

He smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first work in this fandom. I'm a bit rusty on the edges since it's been a while.  
> This was inspired by Cradled in Love by Poets of the Fall. Listen to it if you can (ignore that bit about dolphins singing) cause I've been in pieces because of it. Bucky Barnes kills me. Steve Rogers kills me. So I thought maybe together they could save me.


End file.
